


Separate Entirely

by dacmennis



Category: It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia
Genre: Depression, Gen, Journal Entries, M/M, Wrestling with feelings after death, inability to self-care
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-01-29
Updated: 2016-01-29
Packaged: 2018-05-17 00:50:34
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,046
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5847466
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/dacmennis/pseuds/dacmennis
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"Our end wasn’t a slippery slope. It was like falling off a cliff while the one who was holding you up had just let go, stood up, smoothed his clothes, and walked away whistling with his hands jammed in his pockets, strolling easily.  He faded from me slowly, like warmth between the seasons."</p>
            </blockquote>





	Separate Entirely

**Author's Note:**

> I didn't write this to belittle anyone who has experienced depression or struggle with the depolarizing feeling of emptiness. I often feel myself in this position, and here I used the emptiness that I've been feeling to try and relate to someone, albeit fictional, someone I can imagine to feel the bloodletting my heart is currently undergoing.

Mac was the diamond that scratched Dennis's glassy exterior. He was profound sense of comfort that enveloped one's soul as they slipped out of their physical body and crawled slowly toward an alternative plane of consciousness, smoothly like milk pouring into a bottomless glass.  


Though his lifestyle severely suggested otherwise, Dennis had always romanticized the idea of lavishing Mac with adoration, living up to the daydream of the doting husband, Mac his greatest prize. Executing these thoughts into reality proved difficult to Dennis: he simply couldn't translate the jumbling binary of his desires into a functional work. He attempted to put onto paper the magnitude of loss that he felt after Mac died, as noted in this journal entry from October 18 of that year:  


_...I was so crushed when he lived his life and disposed of me, but what did I expect? Our end wasn’t a slippery slope. It was like falling off a cliff while the one who was holding you up had just let go, stood up, smoothed his clothes, and walked away whistling with his hands jammed in his pockets, strolling easily. He faded from me slowly, like warmth between the seasons._

 _When he died, I was already entering another cycle of depression. It’s scary because I never know how long these cycles will last. The things I tried doing to recover from this mess have only made it worse; my life is now as fruitless as infertile silt. I've stayed in the house and willed myself to recover, I've told myself that I’d get through it come hell or high water. But telling yourself that you WILL recover from any type of depression during a cycle is just about as believable that you’ll put out a house fire with a water pistol. The odds are stacked against you and even the smallest daily tasks seem insurmountable. Going to work was nearly impossible, as I began to panic while driving. I became bound to smaller and smaller areas - first just my home, then my bedroom and bathroom, and finally it was a challenge to leave my bed. I didn’t cry and couldn’t - I did anything to make the tears come. I bruised my legs and pulled my hair and told myself that I deserved all of this pain, but the tears wouldn’t come. Finally, I resigned to the emotional suffocation, and I laid lifeless under a pile of comforters, even in the summer - alternately sweating and freezing with a pounding headache._

_There’s a certain feeling that I get when I’m at the height of my depression spikes. It’s a feeling of dehydration, my mouth dries out and the normally quenching saliva turns to a sticky, garbage-tasting dampness. My temples throb and I feel glued to my bed. Rising out of a sitting position is like tearing the skin of my fat thighs from a Naugahyde backseat of a car during a heatwave. I’ve been melded and accepted as a part of the scorching pleather._

_I feel ashamed of the silent resentment that I believe I feel emanating from those around me. My friends, once so happy and caring and hopeful, now struggle to love me, or care for me, or whatever they feel that they don’t tell me. In my dreams, Mac wears clean, plain black or crisp white t-shirts and he always smells good. I don’t know if I smell good, but suspect that I’m starting to ferment in the same pair of jeans and sweatshirt that I’ve been wearing for three days. My hair is beginning to grease up and my scalp pheromones waft away from me and into the stale air. It’s so cold in the wintertime, and I hate taking off my clothes because I start freezing when I do. Showering seems like so much work. I’m afraid that if I take a shower that I’ll just sit in the bottom of the tub, roll onto my side, and fall asleep. What if I drown? He's not here to save me anymore from my own stupidity and recklessness. And I always saved him! I always did, I did so many times so why couldn't I this time? Why is it the one time I needed him the most, he left without me? He left without me..._  


The journal entries made sense to Dennis, and he latched on to this method of spilling his feelings, because he felt like crying too much when he talked. He never expected himself to crumble like an ancient ruin in the wake of Mac's absence. He had always suspected that Charlie would be the one to lose his mind, unable to release more than stunted cries and words the sound of balled-up newspaper, until he finally imploded upon himself. But presently, it was Charlie - and Dee - who tended to Dennis and made sure he survived with at least the bare necessities of food and water, plunking a kiss onto the top of his head or wrapping him into a hugs that still felt like a mile-wide chasm between them. Dee and Charlie held his hands when he needed to ground himself with the touch of warm skin, after looking too deeply into his own eyes in the mirror and the overwhelming sense of existentialism and the question of "why am I me?" echoed throughout the catacombs of his mind with the garish voice of a child.  


The dreams never relented, each new scene playing out louder than the last in every sense of the word. Dennis cursed the uncanny ability he had to experience all five senses heightened in his dreams. He smelled the wild colognes that Mac wore -- used to wear -- and tasted his kisses, metallic saliva beckoning from the recesses of his unconscious. He fingers ran through Mac's baby-fine dark brown hair and their path terminated at the warm skin at the back of his neck. In the dreams he and Mac were one and the same, a cosmic alliance unadulterated by evil and worry. Dennis's heart tethered to his subconscious and expelled cinematic dreams of intertwining himself in Mac's arms again, and when he would wake, he'd scramble for his journal to hurriedly commit the dream to memory:  


December 3: _I want to reach so far inside you that you feel a sharp pang in your sternum as I conjure your image in my mind from across the universe._

 _I want to walk to the edge of a cliff and see nothing but a trillion faded memories of us; ghosts convincing me to not hurl myself over the edge; that it’s not worth losing these twinkling endless stars and turning them into white dwarfs._

_You gave me a name when I was too weak to speak. You're the man I cannot talk about anymore because I vowed to not let anyone see me cry. I'm forced to feign ignorance while you rip at my insides._

_Now we're only sharing kisses in the secrecy of my dreams. Tonight was no exception; I tilted my head up toward you and my lips matched yours, my tongue unlocking your mouth like a key slips into the grooves and clicks of a sealed door. I laid there exhaustedly on your chest, auscultating your rhythmic heartbeat and the intake of your lungs. Then it was over; it always ends._  


Dennis couldn't recreate these images in his mind when he was awake. The only focus that existed within him needed to be carefully rationed out among the daily tasks of surviving. Walking hurt, eating was bland and pointless, the unbelievable amount of love and care he never imagined Dee and Charlie having within themselves was equivalent to a strip of ointment-soaked gauze on a gaping open wound. Dennis shrugged to himself and vowed to understand why Mac was always enough for him; why anyone else could try to shapeshift into the puzzle pieces he needed to fit, but strangely, they never locked into place in his heart like Mac did.  


Fraught with vertigo exacerbated by his already-present anemia and hypotension, Dennis's body had taken to episodes of syncope when he sat up too fast. Determined to grapple with the beast and overcome the physical symptoms at the very least, Dennis lost the round every time he took a deep breath and ended up passing out into a greyish daze of negative prints behind his eyes. He swallowed deeply and tried again, focusing on the small voice he heard at the back of his mind: "You can do it, baby. Get up and go into the kitchen and get some ice water. That's all you have to do, then you can come and lay back down for awhile." His entire body throbbed with the road rash feeling of Mac's truancy, his feet frighteningly cold against the cracked wooden floor. It had only been two months. How would he ever learn to survive without his personal version of life support that he never understood was keeping him alive? He wanted to be extubated. Why bother breathing for only one? Where was the fulfillment in that? Their love was a quotient of Dennis's heart divided, each chamber of his heart now estranged from the others.  


After awhile, people would see Dennis on the street, and unknowingly lit his nerves on fire with their stupid statements and questions. _“You’ve lost so much weight!” people exclaim after not seeing me for months, and I want to smile but this is not a compliment,_ Dennis thought. _Once, my skin stretched to accommodate you, swelling me full and glowing me pink and fresh like a newborn. Round and soft were my curves, your love inside of me caressing my heart gently. Baby boy, you were my lifeblood, brighting my eyes and adding mischief to my smile. But I no longer feel your deft fingers lift in sync with mine as I gesture and wave. The hollows of my collarbones are mine alone, my cheeks are sullen and solemn. I cannot hide it or pretend. I’ve inadvertently shed you, and I’m not wearing it well.  
_

_I never properly told him or showed him how much I loved him,_ Dennis guilted himself. _I wonder if he ever knew that if it came down to the two of us, and I knew that he'd get kissed by death, I'd have made sure we went down together. Nobody should have to live dragging on like this, bereft of the sparks that fired them to life. Nobody should have to feel like a wet match striking silk, useless and heavy. I am the one who paints the scene every single waking second I get free from having to focus. I keep replaying the first time we ever gave in to each other, your love wrapping me up and suspending me from invisible strings above a stage. I slip into the warm cinnamon coma of reverie where we’re surrounded by creamy pale moonlight streaming into the bedroom and lying down on a huge bed, facing each other, lazily staring each other down. I knew that you were too reserved to reach out and begin peeling away each layer of my senses to strip me away. I was the one who reached out to you instead, your eyes settling closed as I ran my fingers through your hair and then laced them between yours, inching closer to speak how much I loved you right onto your lips. Tiny brushes of touch like feathers caressed you all over as I began kissing you slowly, my fingers first just tickling your palms until I gained your trust and you started to kiss back, hesitant, circumspect. I didn’t want you to worry about if you were doing it right. I just wanted you to take every raw emotion you felt and poured it into loving me in that moment.  
_

_Now please, just show me again, unbuckle your restraints and smother me. Lay me on my back and strip your clothes off and slide yourself into me fully, fucking smash the bottles of feelings you’ve got inside and pour them right into me, let me take everything you have to give and bring yourself alleviation. Understand that I love you more than anything, wherever you are now, I'm still yours, I'll always be yours..._  



End file.
